Category: Delivery

By Jamell Andrews

Mothers-to-be generally hope to have a natural birth; giving birth when it’s time rather than having to be induced. From old wives tales to warnings about the risks of induced labor to mother and baby, the idea of an induced labor has been a cause of anxiety for expectant mothers. A recent Tel Aviv University study, has found that there is little justification for those fears because induced labor carries no more risk than spontaneous delivery.

Eating and Drinking During Labor Are Fine, Researchers Now Say

It is astonishing how many things that women have been told by doctors for decades about giving birth and newborns, have turned out to be completely wrong. Here is a quick review of some of the biggies —

Many U.S. Women of Child-Bearing Age Use Opioid Painkillers: CDC Warns about Birth Defects

A report released earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that close to one-third of all American women of reproductive age got an opioid painkiller prescription filled each year from 2008 to 2012. This is of concern to health authorities because these medicines are known to cause serious birth defects.

Amniotic Sac Is Ruptured by Doctors (and Midwives) More Often than Necessary, According to Studies and Experts

We are all appreciative of the advances that have been made in safely delivering infants in our modern age, which have increased the number of live births, compared to many decades ago. However, just like doctors can get carried away doing unnecessary medical interventions and prescribing drugs that aren’t really needed, in general and specialized medicine, the specialty of obstetrics is no different.

An expectant woman does well to gather all the information she can about labor and delivery, before her due date arrives. Quite unfortunately, in regular hospitals, it is more the norm than the exception to subject mother and baby to procedures that go too far, and which can result in unnecessary complications for mother and infant.

Many women who are having twins opt to have C-sections, to improve chances of having safe deliveries. But a new study, published in October, 2013, in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that moms and babies do equally well, whether the deliveries are vaginal or by C-section. Surgery was only performed when there were complications that could make vaginal delivery dangerous, such as when the second twin had entered the birth canal with the buttocks or feet first, rather than the head; this condition is known as a breech birth.

An experienced doctor is able to determine when to switch from a planned vaginal delivery, to a caesarean delivery, to improve odds that there will be no bad outcomes for the mother or for the babies. In the case of this study, which examined 2,800-plus deliveries, women who were planning to have their twins vaginally wound up getting C-sections 44 percent of the time. But this was still a big improvement over moms who had planned to have C-sections, and who got the surgeries 91 percent of the time (the other 9 percent went into labor and delivered their babies before a C-section could be performed).